In the summer of 1936, a group of Austrian and German writers, mostly Jewish
and forced into exile by the Nazis, gathered in the Belgian seaside resort
of Ostend. They were, as Volker Weidermann writes in this short, resonant
book, a “company in free fall, trying one more time...to feel like a group
of vacationers”. Concisely and unsentimentally, he resurrects their lives
and love affairs, their pleasures in the moment and their paralysing fears
for the future. He conjures up their conversations — about the war in Spain,
the imminent Berlin Olympics and their worry that the world will be deceived
into believing the new Germany is harmless, and their difficulty in making
their voices heard.

His focus is on the friendship of Stefan Zweig, one of the world’s best-known
writers at the time, and Joseph Roth, the melancholic, alcoholic ironist
whose novels celebrate the multicultural